Name
Joseph Aubrey Capstick
Conflict
Second World War
Date of Death / Age
27/03/1943
43
Rank, Service Number & Service Details
Chief Petty Officer Telegraphist
C/J 46054
Royal Navy
H.M.S. Dasher
Awards: Service Medals/Honour Awards
Cemetery/Memorial: Name/Reference/Country
CHATHAM NAVAL MEMORIAL
71, 1.
United Kingdom
Headstone Inscription
Not Researched
UK & Other Memorials
Not on the Hitchin memorials
Biography
His Service Number was C/J 46054 and he was a telegraphist serving on H.M.S. Dasher at the time of his death. The vessel had been launched in April 1941 as the American banana boat ‘Rio de Janeiro’ and converted to an escort aircraft carrier under Lend Lease arrangements between the U.S.A. and Britain. The conversion was affected in three months, and the ship was handed over to the British in August 1942 and renamed ‘H.M.S. Dasher’. She was a notoriously unlucky ship from the time of the conversion with several accidents and unexplained happenings. The vessel participated in the landings in North Africa in November 1942 and in February 1943 it sailed as part of the escort to Convoy JW53 from Loch Ewe to Murmansk. It sustained damage in a gale and left the convoy and went to Dundee via Iceland for repairs. While in the Clyde estuary off the Isle of Arran and refuelling its aircraft, a high-octane explosion erupted and sank the ship in four minutes, watched by eyewitnesses on the Arran shore. Of the ship's complement of 500 only 120 survived. At the time, relatives were refused information by the War Office and the Admiralty, probably to keep the loss secret so that the Germans would not be aware of the loss of an aircraft carrier with the Russian convoys.
From a television programme in October 2003 it seems very likely that a member of the Dasher's crew was used as the body of ‘The Man who never was’. The body was cast adrift in Southern Spain to mislead the Germans regarding the intended attack on Sicily. This would have increased the need for secrecy over the whole incident. The body was buried in Spain and has a gravestone showing the false name given to the body.
Joe Capstick has no known grave and is remembered on the Chatham Memorial to the Missing on Panel 71 Column I. On the 50th Anniversary of the disaster, survivors attended a memorial service at the location of the incident.
He was the son of Edward and Elizabeth Capstick and the husband of Louisa Clara Frances Capstick of Hitchin.
Acknowledgments
David C Baines – ‘Hitchin’s Century of Sacrifice’, ‘Dictionary of Disasters at Sea’ by C. Hocking, ‘They were never told - The Story of HMS Dasher’ by J & N Steele
